American Housewife
By Helen Ellis
Doubleday, 188 pages, $31
Criminals: Love Stories
By Valerie Trueblood
Counterpoint, 256 pages, $23.50
Locating value in a work of literature involves a series of sliding criteria, with each individual reader applying emphasis in different places and measures. It is fashionable these days to assume that for a work to have literary merit, it must be a model of probity or teach its readers some valuable moral lesson. It is equally common for critics – at least those who want to be perceived as serious – to focus on literature that is about large themes and that treats these themes with almost single-minded solemnity.
Very rarely does one hear high-minded readers or critics suggest that one significant characteristic of a good book is that it be entertaining. Too often, enjoyment feels like a literary virtue that is ancillary at best, a byproduct of an author's stylistic prowess or the rectitude of a book's thematic concerns. People talk about how important a book is, how significant its message is or how diligently it addresses a social theme or problem (always, it must be noted, in concert with the political views of the person doing the critiquing). But rarely do people talk about how much fun a book is, or how much they liked the experience of reading it.
It's little wonder if young people feel antipathetic toward the prospect of reading for pleasure, given that the key idea in this formulation – that reading should be pleasurable – too often goes missing. A book that is entertaining first and foremost, the proscriptive and Puritanical thinking goes, must be of less inherent value than one that comes across as dreadfully serious and sober and, therefore, more worthy of furrowed brows and careful nods of approval.
The stories in American Housewife are unabashedly entertaining. Helen Ellis, author of the Southern Gothic coming-of-age hybrid Eating the Cheshire Cat, favours the high-concept aproach in this suite of 12 breezy, beguiling tales of women behaving badly. The Wainscotting War is a twist on the epistolary story, providing the reader with an escalating series of confrontations, conducted via e-mail, between an aging matriarch in a co-op apartment building and a new tenant. The e-mails the women send back and forth start off cool and sarcastic, and quickly degenerate into recitations of vandalism and physical violence.
A former tenant at the co-op, Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III, is name-checked in the following story, Dumpster Diving with the Stars, about a flamboyant reality-television series in which celebrities (including Mario Batali and John Lithgow) compete to see who can scrounge the most interesting antiques for the smallest outlay of money. The Fitter is about a middle-aged Georgia husband born with the preternatural ability to determine women's bra sizes just by looking at them, and My Novel Is Brought to You by the Good People at Tampax takes the idea of corporate sponsorship of the arts to an outrageous extreme.
Ellis's technique is to clothe her stories in the raiments of quotidian domesticity, then add accessories that are patently absurd or bizarre. Her humour is broad and barbed and runs the gamut from pointed character interactions ("'Writing is rewriting,' you tell your husband. He says, 'I can't stand to see you like this'") to charged insults ("It's not Botox that's kept her young looking, it's lying") to macabre grotesquerie ("I put the first batch of oatmeal raisin in the oven and then return my attention to Eddie. I turn on my radio. Dismemberment and freezing are the priorities").
It is perfectly possible to find fault with Ellis's collection, which is repetitive in its approach (especially regarding catalogue stories such as Southern Lady Code, How to Be a Grown-Ass Lady and Take It from Cats), and gleans its style as much from self-help magazines and reality TV as from the more literary satire of Flannery O'Connor. But a reader would have to be churlish in the extreme to let such considerations get in the way of how much pure, unadulterated fun reading these stories proves to be.
"Fun" is not a word that could reasonably be applied to Valerie Trueblood's latest collection, which much more closely resembles the kind of fiction that regularly garners critical accolades and finds its way onto prize shortlists. (Trueblood's previous collection, Search Party, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award.) Beginning with the title and subtitle, which betray a poetic sensibility in the juxtaposition of ideas that appear unrelated on the surface, Criminals: Love Stories emphasizes style and subtlety over incident. Even pieces in which frankly dramatic events unfold read as strangely muted; Sleepover, about a hapless grandmother left in charge of her granddaughter's 14th birthday slumber party, involves a threatening interloper and a nighttime visit from the cops, but doesn't contain the kind of forward momentum one might expect from such a story. "This all took place rather slowly," Trueblood writes at one point, and the reader cannot help but agree.
Though Criminals is a relatively short book, the author's style forces the reader to slow right down, frequently pausing to incorporate temporal changes or slight turns in perspective that are often only elliptically signposted. "I do like it," says one of the characters in Da Capo, about a book she's reading, "but it's taking me forever." In context, this statement takes on an almost metafictional mien, as does the follow-up, about how readers would "complain proudly" about the arduousness of the reading experience.
This is not to suggest that Criminals is a bad book, but it is more taxing than Ellis's collection, relying more on those serious-minded intentions alluded to above to glean appreciation from it. The best stories, perhaps unsurprisingly, are the shorter ones – His Rank, Americans Love Dogs or The War Poem, which provides a distressingly recognizable portrait of literary envy and disappointment.
The longer stories – Aiken or the aforementioned Sleepover – too frequently succumb to a strain of dramatic inertia; the style keeps the reader at a remove, impressed on a line-by-line basis, but falling victim to a kind of enervation that kicks in well before the story actually ends.
Where Ellis's book is refreshingly brash and – dirty word – entertaining, Trueblood's is much more readily apparent as a kind of acceptable highbrow literary fare: Much easier to admire than to truly enjoy.
Steven W. Beattie is Quill & Quire's reviews editor. His column on short stories appears monthly.